Category Archives: On View

Courtesy of the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco. Photography by Henrik Kam.

Guest curator Mariah Nielson is no stranger to the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design in the Dogpatch District. Her knowledge of the intimate, two room space has enabled the exhibit to offer a substantial source of insight towards the creative practice of architecture and design studios. Nielson selected studios that offer a cohesive pragmatism and exciting diversity by individualized processes for a global impact. Continue reading →

Upon first glance, Amanda Williams’s Reliquary 1: To Unlearned People This May Seem to be Full of Nothing and Void of Humanity looks exactly as described in the title. Cut from sheets of plywood, the piece appears like a small house, constructed from panels painted white, and consisting mostly of void, where the wood has been removed. However, on closer examination, one can see that each sheet of plywood is actually a figure — the rectangular holes represent lots, the wood that remains represents streets, and the entire house is folded from the flat surface of a map. This is a house that has been built from a map of Englewood, a neighborhood in South Chicago. Continue reading →

Artist and architect Amanda Williams likely never expected her public art project Color(ed) Theory, for which she surreptitiously painted the exteriors of condemned houses in largely vacant Chicago neighborhoods, to garner significant attention. But in 2015, the Chicago Architectural Biennial highlighted the ongoing project, suddenly giving it a platform with international reach. In her first solo exhibition, Color(ed) Theory is featured alongside other recent multimedia works by Williams at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Continue reading →

Struggling up the hillside in 100 degree temperatures, I peered through the dusty firs and pines, to see a small cluster of birch trees. If they appear out of place even within the variety of species represented in the Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, Oregon, that is because they are— these trees are part of a living sculpture called House for Summer created by artist Helen Lessick. Continue reading →

Recurring Chapters in the Book of Inevitable Outcomes by Brenda Mallory. Image courtesy of the Portland Art Museum.

The Portland Art Museum’s Center for Contemporary Native Art is not a large space, but the curators always manage to squeeze a great deal of work into it, by working in multiple dimensions. This certainly holds true for the current Connecting Lines show, featuring Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation) and Luzene Hill (East Band Cherokee). Continue reading →

According to Japanese folklore, a distressed octopus can chew off an injured leg and a new one will grow in its place. Regeneration and re-invention are certainly subtexts at Takashi Murakami’s mid-career retrospective at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, but this sprawling exhibition also shows that while his work has certainly changed in form and focus, Murakami’s body of work, for all its emphatically contemporary, anime-inspired appearance, is, perhaps surprisingly, conscientiously rooted in hundreds of years of traditional Japanese visual culture. Continue reading →

Gerry Trilling’s most recent body of work, completed during a three-year residency at Studios, Inc. in Kansas City, is conversant with many artists reflecting on burdensome chapters of history through a personal lens. Continue reading →